False Eternity
by SJF96
Summary: The TARDIS is exploding. Time is shattering, threatening to erase all of history. Only one man can prevent total event collapse, but he's trapped in the perfect prison. Alone except for his own failure and an eternity of silence.


"The TARDIS is exploding and I'm the only one who can stop it! PLEASE, LISTEN TO ME!"

My screams are futile. The door narrows to a thin dark slit and vanishes, cutting me off from the rest of the world. Complete silence falls abruptly. I am alone, submerged by a blinding white light.

'No, no, LISTEN!' I writhe, struggling against the chair's cuffs. No use, no point, quit wasting energy. The perfect prison, sound isn't going to escape.

Okay. Okay, calm down, I _can_ get out of this. I've been in loads of worse places. Well, a few. At some point, definitely. Just a box, just a big, fairy tale box. I've seen worse. If I were outside I could crack this thing in thirty seconds with my screwdriver...screwdriver's in my pocket, I can feel the weight. I can't reach it, of course. Wouldn't help anyways, not from the inside.

The perfect prison...I am not trapped here, I am not. I'm getting out of this. Or someone's getting me out...Amy's out there, she'll pull through. Okay, she's surrounded by robot Romans, but she's handled more. She and Rory can-oh. Rory. Not Rory, obviously, he was Nestene too, wasn't he? The realization hurts. Not back from the dead, just a memory, just a trick. Well even so, Amy's out there...with Rory, she's out there with Rory. I sent him after her, he would have been with her when they all changed... well, she could still deal with that, couldn't she? She didn't remember him, after all. Well, yes she did, though, oh, that's bad...

Right. She'll be okay, don't panic. There's still River, she'd make short work of this thing...but River's in the TARDIS, and from what I heard it was going critical. That's bad, that's really, really bad. River's good, but she sounded out of her depth. Amy's time...Can she stop it? Can anything stop it? Would _I _be able to stop it?

No. It would take a miracle. No, no, the TARDIS is blowing up, and all of time and space will be consumed by the blast. Nothing will ever have happened, and I'll be here forever, all...alone...

I _am_ alone. For the first time in centuries, I can't feel the TARDIS. I can't feel the pulse of time, I can't feel the universe...my mind feels small, limited. Is it all gone, or am I just cut off?

Without the song of the universe I feel so tiny, so helpless. I'm _stuck_. I'm really stuck this time, there's nothing I can do in this bloody box, and everything is going to end. Probably has ended already, and never even happened.

Except me. Not even death can beat the Pandorica. I can't get out, there is no out and there never was. I'll be trapped in here forever, conscious, suspended in nothingness with this light and this silence!

No, NO, something will happen, something always happens, think! I can get out of this, I can.

How?

I can't let the hopelessness claim me. There's always something. Always, always, and I have time to think, don't I? Forever, trapped in here...the thought fills me with weakness. I can't have been in here five minutes and I've lost hope. Minutes, years, millenia... how do I know? How will I even feel time passing? There's nothing out there, nothing to measure against. It could have been an eternity already.

I'm going to go mad in here.

I close my eyes, but it doesn't block the white glare of the walls. Calm down. Calm_ down_, you're not going to stay sane like this. Okay. Breathing. My breath sounds ragged and so loud. I'm the only thing moving, the only thing living in this box. Even in the depths of space, I've never heard silence quite like this...it presses, it crowds you, making you feel small and isolated.

_Silence will fall..._Is this it? The doors closed and silence fell. My breathing quickens, sounding harsh and out of place. I have to shout, have to do something.

"I'm here! Silence hasn't fallen yet!"

The sound vanishes unnaturally quickly, like it's been consumed. I'm alone.

The more I think about it, the more the oppressive silence seems to grow. How can silence get louder? Even thinking becomes a burden, measured against this false eternity. Maybe I can sleep. How long? Can I sleep forever? I close my eyes, try to let my thoughts die out, try to make a void I can shelter in.

Silence...

My eyes snap open. Am I imagining noises already? But no, there it is again, a pneumatic hiss. Hope swells, and there it is again, at more and more frequent intervals, getting louder and louder. A sliver of darkness appears in the corner and reality spills through. A wonderfully loud, wonderfully familiar sound floods the space: a high-pitched sonic whine. I'm overwhelmed, but part of me wonders: Sonic? Who is this? It's not going to be _me_, is it, because that would be bad...

I lean forwards as the opening widens, revealing a figure in Roman armor, wielding a familiar green-tipped object and wearing a shocked look that probably mirrors my own.

I stare for a few seconds, barely noticing the feeling of liberation as the chair's cuffs release. With a start I notice the shape of a Dalek behind Rory, but then I realize it seems to be somehow frozen. Okay. One mystery at a time, and I have a more pressing question.

'How did you do that?'

_I found the whole Pandorica concept very intriguing, and wanted to imagine the Doctor's thoughts in the few minutes he spends in there. There are a lot of directions I could have gone and I wasn't very organized, so I just hope this makes some sort of sense_. _Thanks for reading and feel free to critique, especially constructive criticism :)_


End file.
